Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Richard veered around a long stone table set against the wall beneath a huge painting of a lake. Sheltered trails could be seen burrowed through the deeply shadowed pine groves. In the distance, through a bluish haze, majestic mountains rose up to catch brushstrokes of golden sunlight. It was a scene that made Richard long to be back in his Hartland woods on the trails he knew so well. More than anything, though, the painting always reminded him of the magical summer he'd spent with Kahlan in the home he had built for her far back in the mountains.

The summer of Kahlan's recovery from her terrible injuries, as he showed her the natural beauty of his forested world and she once again blossomed back to health, had been one of the happiest times of his life. It had ended all too suddenly when Nicci had arrived without warning and taken him away. He knew, though, that if Nicci had not interrupted it, something else would have. It had been a dream time that had to end; until the looming threat from the Imperial Order was halted, no one could live their dreams. They would all, instead, be swept up in the same nightmare.

They turned a corner around a green marble pillar with a gold capital and base and all plunged down a spiral run of granite steps, Richard and Nicci in the lead with the two Mord-Sith following close on their heels. The stairwell was small for the Keep, but would have dwarfed anything Richard had ever seen growing up back in Westland.

At the bottom, he slid to a halt, momentarily pausing to decide which would be the quickest route; in the Keep it wasn't always the way it would seem. Besides that, it was as easy to get lost in the Keep as it was to lose one's direction in a birch forest.

Cara pushed through between Richard and Nicci, not only to be sure that there would be a red-leather-clad guard to each side of him, but so that she would be the one out ahead of him. As far as Richard knew, Mord-Sith didn't have rank, but Rikka, like the other Mord-Sith, always wordlessly conceded Cara's unspoken authority.

Richard recognized the unique pattern of the thin black and gilded bands lining both sides of the mahogany wainscoting in one of the paneled corridors to the side. From almost since the time he had learned to walk, Richard had used the details of his surroundings to know his way. Like trees in the woods that he recognized because of some peculiarity like a twisted limb, a growth, or a scar, he had learned to navigate through the Keep and places like it by the details of architecture.

He gestured. "This way." Cara charged off ahead of him.

As they ran, their boot strikes echoed off the stone floor of the hall. Nicci was barefoot. He was somewhat surprised that without shoes she could keep up running across the rough stone. Nicci was not the kind of woman Richard ever envisioned running in bare feet. Even running in bare feet, though, she still looked somehow… regal.

It wasn't all that long ago that Richard would not have imagined Nicci ever running again. He was still surprised that he had managed to get her out of the spell-form after the lightning had exploded through the window. For a time, he was sure that they had lost her. If Zedd had not been there to help after Richard had shut down the verification web, they very well might have.

They turned down another hall; long carpets quieted their run and finally led them between two highly polished red marble columns and into the oval-shaped anteroom. A balcony, supported by pillars and arches, ran around the perimeter of the room. The doorways at the back of the balcony were all corridors, arranged like the spokes of a wheel, that led to different levels and areas of the Keep.

Richard bounded down the five steps ringing the room inside the columns and ran past the great clover-leaf-shaped fountain centered in the tiled floor. The fountain's waters cascaded down successive tiers of ever wider, scalloped bowls to end up in a pool contained by a knee-high white marble wall that also served as a bench. A hundred feet overhead a glassed roof flooded the room with warmth and light.

When he reached the far side of the room, Richard pushed ahead of Cara and threw open one of the heavy double doors. He paused on the top of the dozen wide granite steps outside. Nicci halted beside him, to his left, with Rikka on the far side of her. Cara took a defensive place close by on his right. All of them were still catching their breath from the brief but swift run through the Keep.

The grass in the paddock across the way was lush and green in the early-morning light. Beyond the paddock the wall of the Keep rose straight up, making the inner courtyard seem like a cozy canyon. The passing of millennia had left the soaring wall of tightly fitted, dark stone stained with pale tan sediment. Creamy drips of calcium deposits gave the impression that the rock was slowly melting.